Discovery Of The Week (8)
You never know what you might find when you go rooting around.
Tracy Wood and her father, Brian Russell, were digging out the rockery of their garden in Guernsey when they struck metal. After some further patient excavation work, they unearthed a chassis, engine block, front bumper, window frames and other automotive parts which have since been established as belonging to a Daimler dating from the 1940s or 1950s.
Quite how it got there is unclear but the most popular theory is that the previous owner of the house started to do the car up, got bored with it and put a rockery over it to hide it, as you do.
Brian is looking for someone to cart it all away.
Still, this find is not as valuable as that made by Robert Warren as he was rooting around a cupboard in the Hoyt Sherman Place art gallery in Des Moines, Iowa in 2016, on the search for a couple of Civil War flags, as you do.
Wedged between a table and a plaster wall he came across a wood panel painting, water stained and badly damaged. Now it has been cleaned up and restored – a job that took four months – it turns out to be Apollo and Venus by the Flemish painter, Otto van Veen, conservatively valued at $4 million.
It seems that the painting was donated to the Des Moines Women’s Club in 1923 but the subject matter, a naked cherub and Venus de Milo’s unclothed posterior, may have been too racy for the good folk of Des Moines and so it was hidden away.
